


Open Season on Broken Hearts

by roboticonography



Series: Flames 'verse [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Sad Steve is Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 14:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6012898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/pseuds/roboticonography
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deleted scene from Flames We Never Lit: Steve's meeting with the Council, and the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Season on Broken Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of what I promised at the end of Flames We Never Lit. Chronologically, this sits between Chapter 23 and Chapter 24. You should probably read that story before reading this one, but I'm not here to tell you what to do.
> 
> Title inspired by "Open Season" by Lucy Wainwright Roche, possibly the saddest song ever written about Coney Island. [You can hear it here.](https://vimeo.com/82674018)

Barton had clearly had one too many cups of the dismal cafeteria coffee. He was high-strung: gnawing ferociously on a stir-stick, tapping out an irregular beat on the formica table.

 

Nick Fury had invited Steve to a videoconference with the World Security Council, to personally present the evidence they’d gathered about Barnes. Maria Hill was relaying updates from the council room, as frequently as the setting allowed. Natasha, elbows on the table, had her phone cradled in both hands.

 

“Steve just told them he was alone in Kazakhstan,” she reported.

 

Logically, Peggy understood why Steve was protecting the rest of the group. Captain America being court-martialed would draw attention to an issue the Council was trying to sweep under the rug. Of the four of them, Steve’s metaphorical shoulders were the broadest—but that didn’t mean Peggy relished cowering beneath them.

 

Barton took the mangled plastic stick out of his mouth. “And they’re buying it?”

 

Natasha shrugged eloquently.

 

Peggy didn’t imagine there was much anyone could say to contradict him. The facility where Barnes had been held in storage had been neatly and thoroughly demolished after their departure. Yelena Belova was the only person who could possibly place them at the scene, and no one on the Council was about to admit any association with her—assuming she’d delivered an accurate report to whoever had sent her. They had no clue who that could be; as Natasha had predicted, she’d discarded her tracked clothing at the first available opportunity, and disappeared.

 

“Things haven’t changed much,” Peggy remarked, studiedly offhand. “During the war, there were at least seven of us who all took turns being Captain America. But Steve looked nice in the uniform, so.”

 

“Men,” said Barton, shaking his head in feigned disgust. “Always taking the credit.”

 

“Didn’t you rob a bank in your circus outfit and leave behind a calling card?” asked Natasha.

 

He raised his eyebrows. “Me?”

 

“Unless there’s someone else out there who uses trick arrows, wears purple, and calls himself Hawkeye the Great?”

 

“ _If_ I had done anything like that, it would’ve been when I was a juvenile. Those records would be sealed. And it was the Amazing Hawkeye. Excuse you.”

 

Peggy had long since given up trying to determine what parts of the stories Clint told about his past were embellished, or fabricated entirely. And Natasha never failed to play along.

 

“Hawley just asked Steve if he was suggesting that James should be released into his custody.”

 

Peggy felt her stomach jerk forward, as though she were at the peak of a roller coaster.

 

She supported Steve, and she was willing to acknowledge that Barnes had been done a terrible injustice—but the man was still, by all accounts, extremely unstable. Advocating for Bucky was already stretching Steve thinner than Peggy would have liked; he couldn’t be expected to live his life _and_ be Bucky’s keeper too.

 

And yet, it was possible—more than possible, it was likely—that he’d take it on, if given the chance.

 

If that happened, their plan to live together would have to be put on hold. She knew, logically, that Barnes hadn’t been responsible for his actions, but that knowledge couldn’t alter the fact that the man had tried to kill her—would have killed her, if Barton hadn’t intervened.

 

She still had nightmares almost every night, and sometimes flinched when Steve touched her unexpectedly. As much as she loved Steve, in this case, her own well-being had to come first.

 

“They wouldn’t do that, surely?”

 

Natasha didn’t look up from her phone. “Give him a little credit.”

 

Peggy bristled at the implication that _she_ , of all people, might underestimate Steve Rogers. “If it were anyone else in the world, I’d be inclined to agree,” she snapped. “But Steve is incapable of being objective when it comes to—”

 

Natasha held up her phone:

 

_Cap says no_

_Barnes needs hospital_

 

“I don’t know if he’s the only one having a hard time being objective,” said Natasha pointedly.

 

Peggy turned the paper coffee cup in her hand, following the pastel pattern back to the seam and around again. She forced herself to keep breathing, slowly, in and out.

 

“Did he ever tell you about the train?” she asked, deadly quiet.

 

Both Barton and Natasha shook their heads.

 

“I saw him afterwards. He was… it was like a light had gone out. The night I spoke to him, he was angry, he was upset, but he was grieving. By the morning, though, he’d gone beyond anger, beyond emotion entirely. I’d never seen him like that.”

 

“How long did it take him to come out of it?”

 

“Well, that’s just it,” said Peggy. “I’ve no idea. Because two days later, he chased Johann Schmidt onto an aeroplane, and that was the last I saw of him for a very long time.”

 

Natasha clear gaze held Peggy’s for a long moment, before her eyes dropped to the phone in her hands again.

 

“Meeting’s breaking up,” she reported. “Steve got extended administrative leave, and he has to give them a full mission report and copies of all the files we found.”

 

“What about Barnes?”

 

“They’re going to ‘weigh the evidence.’”

 

“Better than a complete dismissal, I suppose,” said Peggy, who was feeling rather uncharitable.

 

“The Council doesn’t usually reconsider their decisions.” Natasha pocketed her phone and stood up. “I’d say it’s the best we could have hoped for.”

 

*

 

After his abduction, Steve had agreed to let Bruce and Tony repair his subcutaneous tracking chip. He still wasn’t on the SHIELD grid, but JARVIS could locate him unless he’d specifically requested otherwise.

 

Peggy normally didn’t make use of this information; doing so felt invasive. But when night fell, and Steve hadn’t come back or called, she asked JARVIS to track him down.

 

A map illuminated on the far wall of the bedroom. Peggy was only a bit surprised to see where Steve had gone—she’d done the same thing herself, once upon a time.

 

She made herself a cup of tea, and took her time getting dressed. The little blue dot on the map never budged.

 

“Right,” she said at last. “JARVIS, how does one get to Coney Island these days?”

 

*

 

Beneath the constellations of coloured lights, Peggy found herself swimming upstream against a wave of homebound revellers—parents and their sticky, cranky offspring, exhausted-looking tourists toting subway maps and oversized cameras. She adopted the same posture and attitude she’d learned to use in the London Underground: shoulders square, elbows out, head held high. Polite in the event of a collision, but never apologizing for taking up space.

 

 

She spotted Steve near the end of a quiet stretch of boardwalk, on a bench overlooking the beach. It wasn’t the same one she’d sat on seventy years before, of course, but it was close enough to the spot that she could feel faint ripples of the old grief and anger, a kind of emotional aftershock.

 

Away from the shelter of the fairground, the wind was high and cold, coming in off the water, but Steve wore only the track pants and t-shirt he used to exercise. The SHIELD campus was almost twenty miles away, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d come the whole way on foot.

 

She approached slowly, giving him time to hear her, and touched his shoulder gently.

 

“It’s still very pretty here at night,” she remarked. “I was here once, after the war. Did I ever tell you?” She knew for a fact she hadn’t.

 

“I feel like I failed him,” he said quietly. “Like I’m still failing him.”

 

The words tore at her. She might have said them herself, the night she’d been here, looking into the ocean and imagining how it had claimed Steve—or later, knowing that she’d been the one to encourage Howard to stop searching.

 

She felt herself starting to well up, and blinked hard at the colourful haze in the distance, until it resolved into the familiar shapes of the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.

 

“I know you’re gonna say it’s not my fault,” he began.

 

“Actually, I wasn’t going to say that at all.”

 

He turned to look up at her, stunned and hurt.

 

“I should think it goes without saying by now,” she elaborated, walking around the bench to sit beside him. She took his hand; the fingers were like ice. “What I was going to say is that you don’t have to do this alone.”

 

He didn’t argue in words, but the adamantine lines of his brow and jaw spoke volumes.

 

“You have people who care about you, who are willing to help you do what’s best for Barnes. He isn’t solely your responsibility.”

 

Steve looked down at their joined hands. “None of you promised to look out for him the way I did.”

 

“Nevertheless. You weren’t the only one in Kazakhstan, regardless of the official story. You weren’t the only one in the council room today. And you aren’t the only one here now, so I wish you’d bloody well stop acting like it.”

 

“I could have—”

 

She silenced him with an emphatic gesture. “Stop. You made the best decisions you could with the information available to you at the time. That’s all anyone can ask of you, Steve, and it’s all you can ask of yourself. You aren’t responsible for what happened. You didn’t know he was alive, you couldn’t have known he—”

 

Her voice broke, quite unexpectedly. Before she could close her eyes in time to stop it, a tear slipped down her cheek.

 

She thought for a moment that he might not have seen it, but then his hand came up to cup her jaw, his thumb brushing over the spot.

 

“Peggy…”

 

“I would _never_ have stopped looking for you if I’d known,” she said, in a hoarse whisper that seemed to belong to someone else entirely.

 

Wordlessly, he folded her into his arms.

 

As his ice-cold cheek pressed against hers, Peggy couldn’t help exclaiming, “Bloody hell!”

 

She felt him snort. “It’s a little windy,” he murmured, rubbing his chilly nose along the side of her neck.

 

She yelped and swatted at the back of his head. “You’re a menace, Steve Rogers.”

 

Whatever he said in reply was muffled by her sweater.

 

“If you want to sit out here until you turn blue, that’s your lookout,” she told him, ruffling his hair. “I want a hot bath, and a cup of tea. You’re welcome to join me in either one.”

 

Rather than letting go, he squeezed her tighter, planting a loud kiss on her cheek. “Hard to turn down an offer like that.”

 

“Indeed. It’s impossible to get a decent cup of tea anywhere around here.”

 

He smiled then, and said, “Thanks for coming to bring me home.”

 

And before she could reply, he was kissing her, the coloured lights still dancing in her closed eyes.


End file.
